Artist Kramar reminisces about historic local mural

Thursday

A Thursday reception recognized longtime Amarillo artist Stefan Kramar and the public art he created.

The focus was on Kramar and the mural he painted in the now-shuttered Rule Building at Third Avenue and Polk Street.

"As best I can pin it down, it was in 1947-48," said Michael Grauer, associate director for curatorial affairs and curator of art at Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum. "This is all about Amarillo being a vital city."

The mural, painted in the original headquarters of Southwestern Public Service, features the utility company mascot Reddy Kilowatt harnessing the power of a herd of horses above representations of Amarillo's industries.

The reception was in an Xcel Energy conference room in the Chase Tower, where a full-size replica of the original dominates one wall. SPS is a subsidiary of Xcel.

Arlette Klaric, director of exhibitions and education at Amarillo Museum of Art, put the mural in perspective by comparing it to other murals done in the trying times of the 1930s and '40s.

"They were meant to be inspiring," she said. "They were very helpful to raise your hope and aspirations."

It is one example of the public art in the Texas Panhandle from the murals in the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum to downtown Amarillo. Grauer holds periodic tours of some of the sites including the basement of the Herring Hotel, the Bivins-Childers offices, the J. Marvin Jones Federal Building and the Rule Building. At the Herring, most of the murals in the basement where there was a nightclub are only ghosts of their former selves.

"In 1989, a water main broke, and no one knew it until water started flowing out the front door," Grauer said. "So they soaked for days."

The Reddy Kilowatt mascot Kramar used was created in 1926 and was eventually licensed to more than 150 investor-owned utilities across the U.S. and in some foreign countries, according to information from the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

In 1998, Northern States Power Co., later to become Xcel, bought the company that controlled the use of the promotional image. About seven years later, Xcel donated 119 boxes of Reddy Kilowatt documentation and artifacts such as coloring books to the National Museum.

Kramar reminisced about creating the original mural, remembering some of the workers who passed by as he painted.

"One of them said, 'Why is he painting that horse orange. Horses aren't orange,'" Kramar said. "I threw down my bucket and walked off the job. Hell, I know a lot of orange horses."

After a few days, an SPS official wanted to get the mural finished and issued a memo.